It's midnight, Sunday night and I'm trying to recover quickly from the past three days, so I can enjoy tomorrow.
What am I trying to recover from?
Well, it all began last Tuesday when I asked S if she had something special she wanted to do this weekend. "Yes, I'd like for us to build that retaining wall we've brainstormed about and then plant the river birch tree. It looks stressed. The leaves are starting to turn yellow."
Friday, being the early-bird-gets-the-worm people that we are, we hit the local cement and block company about 3 o'clock in the afternoon. We quickly roughed out a design and bought half a yard of crushed limestone, 160 decorative blocks (each weighing 25 pounds) and nine square paver stones (each weighing 40 pounds). Mind you, we only had S's small truck to transport all this material, weighing well over 4000 pounds. And, of course, it was too late to have the cement company deliver the blocks because it was 3 o'clock on the afternoon before a holiday weekend. Such good planners we are!
We hauled the crushed limestone home first. That was only about 600 pounds. We shoveled, heaved and hoved it out of the truck bed and onto the driveway. Hurry, hurry, we need to get back before five o'clock to the cement company so the hi-lo driver can load at least half of the 160 blocks onto the truck bed.
Back to the cement yard we go. Nope, the hi-lo driver can't load the pallet with 3,000 pounds of block on our truck bed because it's too narrow. We'll have to load them by hand; me and S, S and me. No matter how I say it, it was still just the two of us.
To our credit, we actually loaded 97 blocks, well over 2000 pounds of concrete, in about 30 minutes. We worked together, we worked smart and we worked hard. The shocks on the truck were in shock I think. The truck was loaded.
We drove home carefully and then unloaded the 97 blocks, weighing well over 2000 pounds. By this time, my muscles were screaming at me, "Who the hell do you think you are? A young, buff stevedore?"
We still had the other half of the blocks back at the cement yard, but by this time it was 6:30 p.m. and we had dinner plans with friends at 8:00. The blocks would have to wait until tomorrow.
Saturday afternoon about 2 (again the early-bird pattern; see what I mean?) we loaded up the other 2000 pounds of block, hoping against hope that no police officer would pull up and inquire why we were taking material out of the cement yard when they were obviously closed. They didn't pull up and we did take the rest of our blocks.
Today was the day to actually begin building the wall. Sadly, my muscles were so fatigued that they began to shake after only a little bit of lifting.
There are angels on Earth though, and we had one help us this weekend in the form of our friend, Kevin. Kevin helped trench out the base, he was on his hands and knees leveling the first course, he toted and lifted and smoothed and did way more than any one could hope for from a friend.
If it weren't for Kevin, I'd be still trying to find the strength to wield a shovel and we'd be still trying to trench out the wall's outline. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank-you's, Kevin!
And this whole experience has left me feeling humbled, ignorant and stupid.
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